The ideas presented in this course were refined and tested when his students established the Agricultural Experimental Circle of the General Anthroposophical Society. Several books appeared and the field has expanded ever since. Today, over 160 countries report statistics on organic agriculture, and the organics sector has an estimated value of $60 billion per annum.
Even more interesting, the use of maps to understand the world has expanded throughout the decades, becoming ever-more refined and encompassing.
In 1933, the Polish-American philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzbyski made a couple observations about maps. He stated that maps are not territories, and that the structural similarities of a map to a territory accounts for the usefulness of the map.
One of the most interesting mapmaking methods to capture usefulness may be the density-equalizing map, which gives each variable a space-related density. Starting with a map like the one below (Figure 1), a variable like organic agriculture may be introduced to result in a map like Figure 2.
The equal-density cartograms give a striking emphasis to certain parts of the map, with results where countries like Australia comparatively blow up and the entire continent of Africa seems to disappear.
Oscar Wilde claimed that "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
We may take his words to reflect upon the power that a map can tell us about looking to the future. With equal-density mapping, clarity abounds, and conclusions may be drawn. Maps give more than just territorial definition; they may in fact teach us about the individual experiments taking place every day as we sit down for lunch.
(by Kavita Singh)
Original article: A World Map of Organic Agriculture (2011) by John Paull and Benjamin Hennig in the European Journal of Social Sciences, 24 (3), pp. 360-369.
I love these kinds of maps! This just goes to show the wide uses and audiences of GIS techniques. They aren't limited to expert use with complex calculations; they can be used just as easily to portray realities that are more easily understood on a map than with words and numbers.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.worldmapper.org/atozindex.html has an index of many maps like this in high resolution that can be integrated into papers. Great way to add a visual to an argument. Older versions of ArcMap had plugin (addons) scripts that could create maps like this, but they are not very compatible with Arc 10. I hope ESRI adds this capability to ArcMap in the next versions.
ReplyDeleteCartograms are really interesting in the way they portray the information. Yet sometimes frustrating and not the best option to use considering they don't relly give any numerical data. And if the range is large enough some countries disappear all together. They look awesome and with the right purpose are great.
ReplyDeleteI would also suggest Landviewer (https://eos.com/landviewer) as it is also great for analyzing terrain with numerous tools for analysis. They have thousands of satellite images uploaded from dozens of satellites daily. You can create any Index of your own and apply to low, medium and high resolution images.
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